Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Moloch describes a trap with no exit. Girard argues societies did find one — and that it was a murder they then had to forget.
This is Girard’s fullest statement, and unusually for a work of theory it arrives as a conversation — a long dialogue with the psychiatrists Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, who press him until the arguments have to hold. It appeared in French in 1978 and in English in 1987. The title is from Matthew: I will proclaim what has been hidden since the foundation.
The mechanism he claims to have uncovered runs like this. Desire is not spontaneous — it is mimetic. We desire what a model desires, and the model who wants the same object is also the obstacle to it. This is where the theory earns its keep: rivals in that position do not diverge, they converge. Both hands reach for the same thing and become more alike in the reaching, which is exactly what each was trying to avoid. He is careful to say competition is productive while it stays inside limits; past them, “rivals are more apt to forget about whatever objects are the cause of the rivalry and instead become more fascinated with one another.”
Pushed far enough, mimetic rivalry dissolves every difference in a society at once. That is the mimetic crisis — indiscriminate violence with no structure left to contain it. Girard’s claim is that such crises were resolved by the scapegoat: the group turns as one on an arbitrary victim, and the murder works. It discharges the violence, restores unanimity, and founds the social order. All are one against the rejected other. Because the community cannot bear to know what it has done, it misremembers the event as the act of a god. On this reading the sacred is our own violence misrecognised, and ritual sacrifice is the mechanism repeated at the lowest available cost.
What makes it more than a theory of archaic religion is the last move. Girard argues the Judeo-Christian texts do not join the misrecognition — they expose it, by taking the victim’s side. Against Freud’s Totem and Taboo he insists Christianity resembles archaic religion in form and inverts it in meaning: if Christ is sacrificed, it is not because God willed it but because human beings wanted it, and the texts say so.
I read it beside Meditations on Moloch because the two describe the same trap from opposite ends. Moloch has no exit built in — imitation escalates and nobody can stop. Girard’s answer is that societies did find an exit, and that it was a killing they then had to forget. That is a darker claim than the coordination literature usually permits, and I have not found a good counter to it.